article thumbnail

The Growing Power of Inside Sales

Harvard Business Review

IBM has invested in social media training, toolkits and personalized digital pages to help its inside salespeople generate leads and manage account relationships. Third, new easy-to-use online webinar and videoconferencing technologies make it possible for inside salespeople to create customer intimacy without field interaction.

B2B 8
article thumbnail

Understanding Customers Is Everyone's Job

Harvard Business Review

retailer Tesco built detailed profiles of customers and then used these insights and a flexible supply chain to customize their products and offers. Creating products and services for market segments of one (" mass customization ") isn''t easy. In a previous post , I described how U.K.